Philosopher of the Damned
how outcast intellectual Charles Fort prophesied our quantum-entangled, binary-coded, multiversed conceptions of reality
We begin to suspect that this is not so much a book we’re writing as a sanitarium for overworked coincidences.—Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, 1919
In the annals of American letters, early twentieth-century paranormalist writer-philosopher Charles Fort (1874–1932)—once dismissed by critics and publishers—ranks in influence today with a handful of literary anchors including Poe, Emerson, and Twain.
Like Poe, Fort invented a genre. This genre is so unclassifiable yet omnipresent that we call it by the author’s adjectivized name: Fortean.
Across four books, the cartographer of the unexplained drilled holes in the straight story of materialist science and created the modern framework for documenting anomalies and the unknown. Fort’s work has not only endured into our age, but the outcast intellect foresaw our quantum-entangled, binary-coded, multiversed—simulated?—conceptions of reality.
Fort’s writing on strange phenomena—starting with The Book of the Damned in 1919, followed by New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932)—drove readers to ponder bends in time and space, alternate dimensions, objects falling to earth, fossils in meteorites, mysterious airships (in an age before UFOs / UAPs), floating islands and oceans, anti-gravity, lights on the moon, and, most famously, raining frogs.
The same books, stylistically elliptical and philosophically esoteric, drove many critics to ponder why anyone would read Fort at all. Reading—and recently narrating—Fort counts among the most confounding literary experiences I have known, ranking in purposeful disorientation with Burroughs and Gurdjieff.
Through his pioneering of paranormal reportage, Fort did for weird facts (or alleged ones) what Edgar Allan Poe did for horror literature: created a genre where none was recognized. The two authors led strangely similar lives of near-penury, uneven but notable literary praise during otherwise struggling careers, and elevation to iconic status after death.
If Fort possessed a singular goal, it was to displace industrial-age man from his presumed pinnacle: to indicate that we—not they—are exceptions or errant and ever-shifting wrinkles in the cosmic order:
But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They’re there a week, or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese.
For any who consider Fort’s objection to self-centric, consensus reality excessive—or fantastical—consider the 2025 findings from the James Webb Space Telescope, which raise the question of whether our galaxy exists within an immense black hole. The images below show a selection of spiral galaxies that rotate opposite from ours, comprising about two-thirds of the 263 galaxies captured by Webb’s Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey.
Researchers were astonished to find that the number of imaged galaxies moving opposite ours surpass those rotating with ours by about fifty percent. This anomaly led chief scientist Lior Shamir to reason that our Milky Way may exist inside of a gigantic black hole and, hence, exhibits outlier behavior apropos of other spiral galaxies.
In our era, weird is just getting started.
“Battalions of the accursed”
By “damned,” Fort meant facts (or at least reports) that, like him, did not fit in: outsider testimonies, observations, theories, and ideas; items considered unfit for consumption, and so were pushed to the margins.
With the discipline of a Hermetic monk, Fort assembled news of things happening around the world that were not supposed to occur, like objects in the sky before the term flying saucers; frogs, stones, and blood careening from the heavens; strange beasts—including wolf children, wild men, and talking dogs; lights in space; spontaneous human combustion—an enduring mystery, I might add; levitation; vampires; stigmatic wounds; clairvoyant visions; and teleportation, a term Fort is thought to have coined—all sorts of supposed occurrences that violated the verities and triumphs of Western man’s gaslit, coal-heated, steam-turbined, and newly electric-powered existence.
Newspapers called the rumple-suited author, at once dowdy and enigmatic, “the Mad Genius of The Bronx.” [1] Born in Albany, New York, in 1874—and losing his mother before age five—Fort lived and labored for much of his life in New York City’s northern borough.
Like a byzantine merchant peddling exotic wares, Fort sojourned daily from the Bronx to Manhattan—subterranean travel seemed like a leaf from his work—for his research ritual at the New York Public Library, where his papers are now archived.
For twenty-six years—nearly to the point of blinding himself (amid other health problems) as he scribbled notes on small squares of paper—Fort functioned as curator of the damned, deliberating over anomalies that few others acknowledged. In his lifetime, Fort pored over reports of more than 65,000 paranormal events of which he deemed about 1,200 worthy of documentation in his books. [2]
If Fort’s authorial tone sounded preternaturally, yet neutrally, confident in the nature of his reports, it is because he often had history—as he soon would the future—at his back. In a typical example, he wrote in 1919:
Peasants believed in meteorites.
Scientists excluded meteorites.
Peasants believe in “thunderstones.”
Scientists exclude “thunderstones.”
As documented by historian of science Simon Schaffer, eighteenth-century scientists mocked villager reports of meteorites since “plebeians were reckoned superstitious.” [3] The class-based “Enlightenment meteor-denial,” in historian Timothy Greive-Carlson’s phrase, ended only with extraordinary evidence of fiery rocks from space following the turn of the nineteenth century. [4]
Lonely Seeker
Fort knew heartache in his efforts. In addition to his nonfiction, he wrote ten novels but published just one, The Outcast Manufacturers, in 1909. The tenement drama attained scant success. He also produced a fragmentary memoir in 1900. [5]
But in 1915–1916, Fort made a departure, assembling two books on extra-normal phenomena and theories, X and Y.
Although esteemed by novelist Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)—a longtime friend and supporter—the manuscripts, even with Dreiser’s endorsement, found no takers among New York publishers. A distraught Fort burned them. [6] Dreiser could not believe it: “They are so wonderful to me that it would be like destroying Karnak.” [7]
Publishers be damned, as Mike Dash wrote in the Fortean Times in 1989:
Dreiser was nevertheless utterly captivated by X, in which Fort suggested that events on earth were controlled by a higher civilization in space and that the world itself, and everyone on it, was not real but an illusion projected from an unknown location, the X of his title. Dreiser’s own reading and his semi-pagan Indiana background had increasingly distanced him from orthodox religion and science; not yet ready to formulate his own philosophy, he seized on Fort’s half-formed, semi-satiric, world-view. “I had not read three paragraphs before I said to myself, this is not only beautiful, it’s wonderful,” Dreiser wrote in an unpublished memoir of Fort . . . But it had less effect on the publishers Dreiser approached on Fort’s behalf . . . all rejected the manuscript as they did Fort’s second work of non-fiction Y (1916), which argued for the existence of a malignant civilization beyond the North Pole.
Fort discovered a new resolve. He set to work on a third book in his immolated canon. After laboring silently for months, Fort in July 1918 sent Dreiser a letter of just three lines:
Dreiser!
I have discovered Z!
Fort!
In Z, Fort not only found new footing in his writing but grasped an underrated truth: good titles are an author’s lifeline. Rather than the obscure appellation Z, Fort found a phrase that proved both thematically sincere and intellectually thrilling: The Book of the Damned.
What makes a good title? 1) Combination of opposites. 2) Phraseology that evokes a world just beyond view. 3) Truth-telling about what is inside. Fort checked all three. To this I add the caveat that a basic title also does wonders—if the subject is sufficiently strong, e.g., Lincoln.
The Bronx philosopher devised a fresh methodology. Biographer and historian Jim Steinmeyer notes:
The previous formula for “crank” books had been to doggedly gather observations and assign them to a grand theory: X continually postulated a race on Mars; Y tied its facts together by speculating on a continent concealed at the North Pole. In contrast, long stretches of The Book of the Damned seemed content to be damnable, and nothing but damnable. Instead of assembling his data to support a theory, he treated these oddities like his characters in The Outcast Manufacturers—releasing them in front of his audience and then stepping back to watch them perform; whispering suggestions in the reader’s ear, playing the master of ceremonies with an occasional wry comment or observation.
This time, Dreiser went in for the kill. He told Fort, “I took it—The Book of the Damned—direct to my personal publisher, Horace Liveright, and, laying the book on the table, told him to publish it. And when, after a week or so, he announced, ‘But I can’t do it. We’ll lose money,’ I said, ‘If you don’t publish it, you’ll lose me.’” [8]
And with that, the damned found a home.
With the help of PR maestro Edward Bernays (1891–1995), then a publicist for Boni & Liveright, the damned also found readers. “We were able to stir up national interest” for Fort, Bernays wrote in his 1965 memoir Biography of an Idea, “because it challenged the fetish of the logic of science, strong in 1920. Fort wrote about freaks of nature that defied scientific analysis, such as frogs raining from the clouds.”
To the present, Fort’s reports of frog downpours, noted several times in The Book of the Damned, are the episode for which he is most recalled. The incident was recreated in the acclaimed psychological drama Magnolia in 1999. “I got it first from Charles Fort, then from the Bible,” director and writer Paul Thomas Anderson told Variety, which oddly called Fort a “novelist.” [9]
The article continued: “The young auteur also credits Fort with the story that opens the film, about three men being hanged named Green, Berry and Hill, in a town called Green Berry Hill. ‘Yeah,’ Anderson said, ‘that’s from Charles Fort’s Wild Talents.’” Fort had written: “In the New York Herald, Nov. 26, 1911, there is an account of the hanging of three men, for the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, on Greenberry Hill, London. The names of the murderers were Green, Berry, and Hill.”
Bernays concluded: “I do not know to this day whether Fort took himself seriously or wrote tongue in cheek. Whatever his motive, the book received much publicity, as we tied it in with news coverage of scientific events, such as signals reported to have been sent to the earth from Mars.”
Data of Disbelief
Although doggedly unorthodox about the reality of his reported events—“I believe nothing,” Fort later wrote in Lo!—he was deadly serious about the enduring strangeness of our world. In 1919, Fort’s opening salvo announced in his singular and sometimes abstruse style:
A procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You’ll read them—or they’ll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.
Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they’ll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.
A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety.
The ultra-respectable, but the condemned, anyway. The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness: the aggregate voice is a defiant prayer: but the spirit of the whole is processional.
The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogmatic Science.
But they’ll march.
March they did. Amid Fort’s blizzard of reports, a discernible philosophy emerged. Fort sought to upend man’s presumed status of dominion and his capacity to know reality through positivistic laws.
“I think we’re all bugs and mice,” Fort wrote, “and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese . . . What is a house? It is not possible to say what anything is, as positively distinguished from anything else, if there are no positive differences.”
In an observation that comported with quantum, psi, and simulation queries in the following era, Fort ventured: “I conceive of one inter-continuous nexus, which expresses itself in astronomic phenomena, and chemic, biologic, psychic, sociologic: that it is everywhere striving to localize positiveness: that to this attempt in various fields of phenomena—which are only quasi-different—we give different names.”
In a supposition that probably would have evoked grins from physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) and next-generation “many worlds” theorist Hugh Everett III (1930–1982), Fort pondered reality as a cosmic wholeness of potential and infinite events “in which all things are localizations of one attempt to break away and become real things.” Schrödinger’s dual (or infinite) cat perhaps wishes to be known. Hence,
We are not realists. We are not idealists. We are intermediatists—that nothing is real, but that nothing is unreal: that all phenomena are approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness.
So then:
That our whole quasi-existence is an intermediate stage between positiveness and negativeness or realness and unrealness.
Like purgatory, I think.
While there is no evidence the contemporaries corresponded, horror master H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) knew Fort’s work and appears to agree with the writer in the opening line of Lovecraft’s 1926 short story “The Call of Cthulhu”: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
In a letter of November 1936 to fantasy writer Fritz Leiber, Jr., Lovecraft wrote: “I note your reference to the late Charles Fort—some of whose books I have read with extreme interest. I don’t think his scraps of bizarre reporting made out much of a case against accepted science, but I do tremendously admire the zeal & consistency of his delvings. He makes magnificent weird source-material!” [10]
Some readers considered Fort a heterodox genius and modernity’s greatest critic of science; because Fort understood that science in the early twentieth century had succumbed to its own orthodoxy to the point of excluding things that did not fit, thereby concretizing a blinkered model of humanity’s capacity to understand or even consider laws and events beyond its ken. Today, arbiters of “official knowledge”—with Wikipedia as their writ creed—typically omit or condemn anything that falls beyond consensus theory or timeline, such as the empirical success of America’s “psychic-spying” program. [11]
Fort’s view of humanity was not hopeful. He echoed perennial gnostic themes of the individual functioning in an ersatz world, blinded to who or what he serves. In that vein, Fort can be considered a secular gnostic. “I think we’re property,” he wrote of the evolutionary ladder. “I should say we belong to something.”
In 1921, an enthusiastic Dreiser told critic H. L. Mencken, “To me no one in the world has suggested the underlying depths and mysteries and possibilities as has Fort. To me he is simply stupendous.” [12]
H. G. Wells, on the other hand, called Fort in a 1931 letter to Dreiser, who had pushed his work on the sci-fi pioneer and futurist, “one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out-of-the-way newspapers . . . And he writes like a drunkard.”[13]
There is some justice in Wells’s claim, although I would say that reading Fort is, at times, like reading an annotated bibliography. Sometimes, a bibliography written when drunk (or read when drunk)—but at just the moment of giving up, one encounters a razor-witty observation about conceptual terminology and exclusionary science, like this one from The Book of the Damned: “Or oneness of allness: scientific works and social registers: a Goldstein who can’t get in as Goldstein, gets in as Jackson.” Or: “we begin to suspect that this is not so much a book we’re writing as a sanitarium for overworked coincidences.”
For his part, Mencken also “puzzled” over Dreiser’s ebullience. The New York Times echoed the eminent critic, concluding in its review of February 8, 1920, that “[Any] conclusion . . . is so obscured in the mass of words and quagmire of pseudo-science and queer speculation that the average reader will find himself either buried alive or insane before he reaches the end.”
The paper’s future evaluation proved kinder, if still jaundiced, with the Times naming Fort the “Enfant Terrible of Science” in the headline of its March 1, 1931, review of Lo!, sometimes considered Fort’s most readable effort.
Afterlife
Whatever detractors might say, Fort achieved the rarest of distinctions: his name became the adjective Fortean—coined by critic Ben Hecht in 1920 [14]—for unexplained anomalies. Fort ranks with a rare group of artists whose names define cultural categories, such as Lynchian for filmmaker David Lynch’s weird discordia.
History favored Fort’s mission. About twelve years after the writer’s death, Allied fighter pilots in the final months of World War II, like Crusaders returning with tales of exotic lands, brought home reports of flying objects called “foo fighters.” Foo fighters were silvery or fiery spheres that appeared abruptly and flew alongside the pilots’ planes. The balls or disks had no obvious means of propulsion but seemed under some kind of intelligent command. “If it was not a hoax or an optical illusion,” Time magazine wrote on January 15, 1945, “it was certainly the most puzzling secret weapon that Allied fighters have yet encountered.”
Following the war in 1947, American civilians—most notably Washington-state pilot Kenneth Arnold—began cataloging what came to be called “flying saucer” sightings. Silvery disks appeared over Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and, most famously, at the Air Force base near Roswell, New Mexico, anointing Roswell the most controversial “crash site” on earth. The U.S. and other militaries took matters seriously enough to launch official investigations and a new term entered the lexicon: Unidentified Flying Object.
“Fort—and science fiction more generally, both materialistic and Theosophical—provided an interpretive framework” for the dawning saucer age noted Joshua Blu Buhs in his virtuosically documented 2024 study of Fort’s legacy—the first such book-length treatment I know—Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers.
For pulp fans, a similarly enthralling but more sinister adjacency to Ken Arnold’s narrative was unfolding. In the 1940s, a bounding subculture of readers grew entranced with reports of “inner earth” and its alien inhabitants. Hollow- earth theories had a long and tangled history, and the legend resurfaced in a series of “true” reports that began running in January 1944 in the pulp monthly Amazing Stories.
Richard Sharpe Shaver, a Pennsylvanian writer, artist, folk philosopher, factory worker, and sometime mental patient, promulgated the mythology of an underground race that did not wish humanity well. His tales were defended and embellished by the magazine’s energetic editor, Ray Palmer. In 1948, Palmer launched his monthly Fate, the flagship of fantastical journalism, which featured a historical profile of Fort (“Apostle of the Impossible”) in issue three. Sounding the oddest tribute (in a tight competition), Fate intoned: “He became famous because he didn’t believe in anything!”
The 1960 French classic of speculative history Morning of the Magicians by journalists Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier—billing itself an “Introduction to Fantastic Realism”—did much to burnish Fort’s reputation as a prophet of rejected knowledge. Translated to English in 1963, Morning of the Magicians attained wide cultural currency, anointing “the crazy wise man of the Bronx” its resurrected eminence:
Before the first manifestations of Dadaism and Surrealism, Charles Fort introduced into science what Tzara, Breton, and their disciples were going to introduce into art and literature: a defiant refusal to play at a game where everybody cheats, a furious insistence that there is “something else.”
The Book of the Damned had appeared in France just five years earlier—to little success. Fort now gained notice less for what he wrote than for what was written about him.
Ten years on, a well-produced and literate glossy magazine of the strange, the aforementioned Fortean Times, issued its maiden edition—calling itself The News: A Miscellany of Fortean Curiosities until 1976. It continues today. Fort’s books were widely reissued and anthologized—as they are now—often with richly updated covers suited to Aquarian-Age psychedelia.
Jim Steinmeyer subtitled his sprightly and subtle 2009 biography of Fort, which I published at Penguin Random House, The Man Who Invented the Supernatural. Whether heralded or beneath the surface, Fort’s influence frames today’s conception of UFOs, cryptozoology, parapsychology, and the paranormal—modern terms nascent or not-yet-heard in his lifetime. Fort’s efforts produced a dawning and extant era of cataloging and analyzing the unexplained.
Fortsight
Rather than dispel Forteana, our current era fuels it. Key examples include enduring and eerily unsolved cattle mutilations in the twenty-first century—probably the most confounding Forteana of our time. [15] Likewise the Pentagon Tic-Tac videos and, as of this writing, the 2026 release of not-yet-examined government UFO files. There exist volumes of widely vetted and replicated experimental evidence for precognition, psychokinesis, and retrocausality. [16] No amount of pseudo-rational Wiki articles can wish any of this into the cornfield.
Fort’s strange lights? They reemerged as light plasma—an explanation for a fraction of UFO sightings, reckoned scientists in the January 2024 Journal of Modern Physics. [17] These sometimes seemingly intentional bodies of light “feed” on radiation and are occasionally mistaken for craft. But here’s the weird part: the research team posits plasmas as “fourth states” of matter (following solids, liquids, gases); these plasmas “may represent a form of pre-life.” In what resembles a page from Fort, orbs and ball lightning are possible precursors to life itself.
Fort’s instinct for the enduring strangeness of reality seems an evergreen—certainly in matters of media. Cultural historian Buhs places qualified liability on Fort and his offspring for digital conspiracy culture:
Fort and Forteans played their part in the creation of this world; they are not blameless. They eroded the distinctions between truth and falsity, undermined the authority of experts and expertise. They launched a thousand conspiracies into the national consciousness. But conspiracism had changed since The Book of the Damned, as had science fiction, the avant-garde, and UFOlogy. Fort’s playfulness had been replaced by [progenitor Fortean Tiffany] Thayer’s acerbic nihilism, which became omnipresent and decoupled from any need to compile evidence or craft arguments.
Buhs’s statement must be made—yet I am uncertain how I feel about it. A century before Fort, the nation’s Jacksonian impulse already served to undermine “experts.” America’s brand of suspicious populism sparked the nationwide Anti-Masonry craze of the 1820s / 1830s. Ironically, Andrew Jackson, himself a Mason, was the movement’s designee to expunge corruption.
I do not detect a politics in Fort. In my best estimate of his writing, Fort exempted himself entirely from such considerations. Fort’s work—as distinguished from that of later Forteans—conveys an authorial tone heralded by twentieth-century philosopher and critic of science Paul Feyerabend: “I am for anarchism in thinking, in one’s private life, BUT NOT in public life.” [18]
I venture Fort would agree.
X was lost to ashes. But it is unlikely there would exist X-Files without it. The same holds true of popular docuseries from Ancient Aliens to The UnBelievable with Dan Aykroyd. Fort’s influence is foundational to current media culture.
Whether Fort invented the supernatural, the Mad Genius of The Bronx forced soi disant rationalists of all columns to squeeze over and make room for weirdness at the table of modern life. Extend a tentacle and pass the salt.
Notes
[1] From a recollection by journalist H. Allen Smith in his memoir Low Man on a Totem Pole (Blakiston, 1941).
[2] Mysteries of the Unknown: Time and Space, Volume 18 (Time-Life Books, 1990)
[3] “Late-Enlightenment Crises of Facts: Mesmerism and Meteorites” by Simon Schaffer, Configurations, Spring 2018
[4] American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the life of Johannes Kelpius by Timothy Grieve-Carlson, Oxford University Press, 2024
[5] “Charles Fort: His Life and Times” compiled by Bob Rickard, 1979, 1997, Forteana.org
[6] “Charles Fort and a Man Named Dreiser” by Mike Dash, Fortean Times, issue 51, 1989
[7] Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural by Jim Steinmeyer (TarcherPenguin, 2009)
[8] Steinmeyer (2009)
[9] “‘Magnolia’ helmer ribeted by novelist’s frogs: Fort, ‘Wild Talents’ were major influences on Anderson” by Steven Gaydos, Variety, February 7, 2000
[10] Tentaclii: News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft, “Lovecraft and Charles Fort,” May 24, 2024
[11] “Follow-up on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) remote viewing experiments” by Álex Escolà- Gascón, et al., Brain and Behavior, May 3, 2023
[12] Dreiser-Mencken Letters: The Correspondence of Theodore Dreiser & H.L. Mencken, 1907–1945, Volume 2 edited by Thomas P. Riggio (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986)
[13] Letters of Theodore Dreiser, Volume 2 edited by Robert H. Elias (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959)
[14] “Whatever the purpose of Charles Fort, he had delighted me beyond all men who have written books in this world. Mountebank or Messiah, it matters not. Henceforth I am a Fortean.” Chicago Daily News, January 21, 1920.
[15] “Six Cattle Found Dead in Texas With Their Tongues Missing” by McKenna Oxenden, New York Times, April 22, 2023
[16] E.g., a meta-analysis of psychical research data appeared in the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association: “The Experimental Evidence for Parapsychological Phenomena: A Review” by Etzel Cardeña, American Psychologist, 2018, Vol. 73, No. 5.
[17] “Extraterrestrial Life in Space. Plasmas in the Thermosphere: UAP, Pre-Life, Fourth State of Matter” by R. Joseph, et al., Journal of Modern Physics, January 2024
[18] Against Method, fourth edition, by Paul Feyerabend (Verso, 1975, 1988, 1993, 2010)
Further reading:
Question Authorities
This article challenges a widespread premise in the social sciences: classifying belief in the paranormal as symptomatic or dysfunctional. It is written as a scholarly paper, structured and referenced in American Psychological Association (APA) style. You will find it in no academic journal—whi…
My 2026 narration of The Book of the Damned:
Oh, what a fascinating person!
Nice work on Fortran commentary👍👍👍😁